Islamic State militants grab new weapon - Iraqi wheat

Maggie Fick

Baghdad: After seizing five oil fields and Iraq's biggest dam, Sunni militants bent on creating an Islamic empire in the Middle East now control another powerful economic weapon – wheat supplies.

Fighters from the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIL, have overrun large areas in five of Iraq's most fertile provinces, where the United Nations food agency says about 40 per cent of its wheat is grown.

Islamic State fighters in a still from a video released by the militant group. Photo: AFP

Now they're helping themselves to grain stored in government silos, milling it and distributing the flour on the local market, an Iraqi official said. The Islamic State has even tried to sell smuggled wheat back to the government to finance a war effort marked by extreme violence and brutality.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he would press ahead in the Iraqi courts with his increasingly unlikely bid to retain power and would not turn to the army.

With so many political forces now aligned against Mr Maliki, including the United States and Iran, and with his retreat from veiled threats to use force, the intensity of the political crisis that has gripped Baghdad in recent days has diminished.

In his weekly speech, Mr Maliki said he was refusing to step aside because "we are defending the right of those who have voted" in the country's general election in April – in which his Shiite-led bloc won the most seats, though not a majority, in parliament.

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Mr Maliki has argued that he has the right to be asked first by President Fouad Massoum to try to form a new government, and that Mr Massoum acted unconstitutionally when he nominated Haider al-Abadi, another Shiite politician, instead.

While Iraq faces no immediate food shortages due to the Islamic State's commandeering of wheat supplies, the longer-term outlook is deeply uncertain.

Hassan Nusayif al-Tamimi, head of an independent nationwide union of farmers' co-operatives, said the militants were intimidating any producers who tried to resist.

"They are destroying crops and produce, and this is creating friction with the farmers. They are placing farmers under a lot of pressure so that they can take their grain," he said.

Many farmers have joined the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have fled the militants' advance. Those who remain have yet to be paid for the last crop, meaning they have no money to buy seed, fuel and fertilisers to plant the next.

It is unclear how much wheat has fallen into rebel hands, as the government still controls parts of the provinces. However, a source at the Agriculture Ministry said about 30 per cent of Iraq's entire farm production, including the wheat crop, is at risk.

A senior Iraqi government official said militants had seized wheat in recent weeks from government silos in the provinces of Nineveh and Anbar, which both border Syria. These included 40,000-50,000 tonnes taken in Tal Afar and another Nineveh town, Sinjar, where tens of thousands of local people from the Yazidi religious minority have fled the militant onslaught to a nearby mountain range.

Islamic State insurgents have also seized several towns and villages from rival Islamist groups in Syria, an organisation monitoring the war in Syria said on Wednesday.

Already in control of large areas of northern and eastern Syria, Islamic State's latest gains include the towns of Turkmen Bareh and Akhtarin, 50 kilometres north-east of Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based in Britain, reported.